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Palestine Open Thread 2024-153
News & views related to the war in Palestine …
Of interest:
US has sent Israel thousands of 2,000-pound bombs since Oct. 7 – Reuters
Between the war's start last October and recent days, the United States has transferred at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions, according to the officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
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Israel Reduces Food for Palestinian Security Prisoners, Conceals Data, Sources Say (archived) – Haaretz
The petition was filed following the dozens of testimonies from security prisoners and detainees who are not connected with Hamas that the Prison Service has significantly reduced their food rations, to the point of starvation, causing them to shed dozens of kilograms.
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The Postwar Vision That Sees Gaza Sliced Into Security Zones Concentration Camps (archived) – Wall Street Journal
The plans—whether or not they get adopted in full—reveal hard realities about the aftermath that rarely get voiced. Among them, that Palestinian civilians could be confined indefinitely to smaller areas of the Gaza Strip while fighting continues outside, and that Israel’s army could be forced to remain deeply involved in the enclave for years until Hamas is marginalized.
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Israel Is Officially Annexing the West Bank (archived) – Foreign Policy
In late February, Smotrich—an avowed homophobe and proponent of Jewish superiority—signed an agreement with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to transfer a number of governmental powers in the West Bank from the territory’s military commander to Smotrich. (In addition to serving as finance minister, Smotrich is also a minister in the Defense Ministry.) The move was agreed upon in the coalition agreement between Likud and the Religious Zionist Party.
mark2@311
In case you have yet to notice the overall tenor of my postings…I TOTALLY despise idiotology. If you attribute “wokeism” to gays, you have another think coming. As one of perhaps a dozen original founders of the 1969 gay liberation movement, from FREE in May in Minneapolis, to the CHF and the San Francisco Free press in August and then onto lodging with the redoubtable Morris Kight…on his invite on 2-12-70…I invested those months as a full-time activist. My association with that original movement…long since coopted by a combination of wealthy gays and outsiders with an agenda…crescendoed and terminated with and shortly after the Christopher Street West parade in July of ’70. That massive celebratory coming-out party was the very FIRST major “pride” parade.
Duties accomplished, I hied back to Minnesota a couple weeks after CSW and along the way I happened to pick up a copy of Time magazine. Theirs was the first major national media coverage of a gay liberation event. The tone of their article was surprisingly positive. The kicker was a slogan which I had suggested as a button to be produced by LAGLF: “Better Blatant than Latent”.
Since that memorable couple of years, with the Committee for Homosexual Freedom activating in April of ’69…in San Francisco, of course…the wave then exploded in quiet, culturally conservative Minneapolis where my then lesbian roommate Korrine Phelps, suggested that we form a homosexual study group at the Upper Midwest’s primary hippie hangout on the near campus West Bank on Cedar Avenue, the Coffeehouse Extempore. Having already been active in political matters, I suggested to the gathering that we form an organization called FREE, acronymic for Fight Repression of Erotic Expression.
My roomie had been in touch with Leo Laurence, the primary mover and shaker for CHF in San Francisco. So I quit my editor position and invited Chris, my hottie B.F. to ride along. A genuine Tranny of the first and original order, Stevie Rome, asked if he/she could join us. Genuine tranny, because she literally hated her male plumbing…that is the acid test…long before the faddism developed.
In S.F. I quickly became part of the CHF, where we held numerous street demonstrations, including a picketing of the SIR drag ball right there on Market Street. Jack Ransom was the first of the out in the street bearded ladies in that demo. Sexual Freedom League founder Jeff Poland and his G.F., Phyllis were among the non-gays who joined us. Phyllis earned the sobriquet of Phyllis Dildo, as she wore one that evening.
Three weeks earlier, as I had been recruited by two gay gentlemen, one of whom, an attorney, who later became a S.F. municipal judge and the other, the owner of a Haight Street shop and of a handful of street newspapers. So I edited the first gay liberation newspapers on the planet, the San Francisco Free Press. First edition featured my Minneapolis friend, Lonnie, wearing nothing but my bush-jacket, right out there showing his stuff on page One, along with a headline reading: “Homosexual Civil War”.
The big event, though was our picketing of the Hearst yellow-rag, the San Francisco Examiner. Someone in an upper floor dropped a bag of purple ink on our parade…and the sidewalk. Stevens McClave, who a year earlier had been with the Situationists in Paris during their uprising, rubbed his hand in the ink…then proceeded to place pretty purple handprints on the granite walls of the Examiner building. Suddenly, a SFPD Tac-Squad pig grabbed Stevens from behind. Some 13 of us were busted. With my 35MM Beseler Topcon, I was not “liberated” of the camera and managed to get and later print in the SFFP, what must have been the first ever photo of a straight woman friend who had joined us…taken from the inside of a paddy-wagon.
Morris Kight attended a confab of California activists on a late Autumn day at a Berkeley venue. It was there that he recruited me to come down to LaLaLand and add some of that S.F. energy to the recently created Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, which he had created along with archivist Jim Kepner along with Johnnie Burnside and his partner, Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society, Americas initial homophile group during the McCarthyite days in the late 40’s.
Our first ever LAGLF street action was held in front of the notorious Barney’s Beanery, which “sported” a sign behind the bar exclaiming “No Fagots”. About a month later, we picketed the World Invitational Premiere of “Boys in the Band”, the first every Hollywood production with a gay theme. Amongst our group were Gene Zukor and his lover Ken Gridley. Gene’s granddad, Adolph was the founder of Paramount. Right out there on the red carpet, Gene proudly hefted a sign I’d devised: “Gay Blades are Sharp”.
THAT caught Hollywood’s attention.
Today, however, the Gay liberation movement has long been coopted. One of my old GLF buddies is still in the game. However, he remains a member of the gay ghetto in a sense. He identifies as “Queer” and even as a “faggot”. Those are terms similar to that of the younger Black street types who call each other “Nigga”. Their elders, from the days of Martin Luther King, sadly shake their heads. So do I in my own way.
Posted by: aristodemos | Jul 2 2024 4:06 utc | 241
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